The James R. Vertin Award

The James R. Vertin Award is presented periodically to recognize individuals who have produced a body of research notable for its relevance and enduring value to investment professionals.

This award was established in 1996 to honor James R. Vertin, CFA, for his outstanding leadership in promoting excellence and relevancy in research and education.

Distinguished Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management

Robert C. Merton is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He was the George Fisher Baker Professor of Business Administration and the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard Business School. Dr. Merton is resident scientist at Dimensional Holdings Inc. and is the creator of Dimensional Managed DC. He currently focuses on the Target Retirement Solution, a global integrated retirement-funding solution system. Dr. Merton's research focuses on finance theory, including lifecycle and retirement finance, optimal portfolio selection, capital asset pricing, pricing of options, credit risk, loan guarantees, and improving the methods of measuring and managing macro-financial risk. In addition to numerous other awards, he received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for a new method to determine the value of derivatives. Dr. Merton received a BS in engineering mathematics from Columbia University, an MS in applied mathematics from California Institute of Technology, and a PhD in economics from MIT.

Kerschner Family Chair Professor of Finance, Stern School of Business, New York University

Aswath Damodaran is the Kerschner Family Chair Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he teaches corporate finance and valuation to MBAs, executives, and practitioners. He is the author of five books on valuation, three books on corporate finance, and three books on portfolio management, and he was co-editor of the book Investment Management with Peter Bernstein. Professor Damodaran has published articles in a number of journals, including the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and the Journal of Finance. He was named the most popular US business school professor in a 2011 survey by Businessweek. Professor Damodaran also writes a popular blog, Musings on Markets. He holds an MBA and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Purcell Professor of Finance, Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University

Maureen O’Hara is the Robert W. Purcell Professor of Finance at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. She is an expert on market microstructure and publishes widely on banking and financial intermediaries, law and finance, and experimental economics. Professor O’Hara is the author of numerous journal articles, as well as the books Market Microstructure Theory; High-Frequency Trading: New Realities for Traders, Markets, and Regulators; and Something for Nothing: Arbitrage and Ethics on Wall Street. She has served as president of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, and the Financial Management Association and as executive editor of the Review of Financial Studies. Professor O’Hara was a member of the CFTC-SEC Emerging Regulatory Issues Task Force (the “flash crash” committee) and served on the Global Advisory Board of the Securities Exchange Board of India, the Advisory Board of the US Treasury’s Office of Financial Research, and the SEC’s Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee. She was named to Institutional Investor’s Trading Technology Top 40 and is a fellow of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts. Professor O’Hara is an adviser to Symbiont, a company focusing on blockchain and smart securities, and AVA Labs, a cryptocurrency and blockchain startup.

John C. Bogle was founder and former chief executive of the Vanguard Group, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and president of its Bogle Financial Markets Research Center.

Yale School of Management

William J. Bernstein is a principal of Efficient Frontier Advisors, LLC.

Terrance Odean is Rudd Family Foundation Professor of finance at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business.

Frank J. Fabozzi, CFA, is a professor of practice at Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University. He has held various professorial positions in finance at MIT, Yale, Princeton, EDHEC Business School, New York University, and Carnegie Mellon. He is the editor of the Journal of Portfolio Management, cofounder and coeditor of the Journal of Financial Data Science, and an editor of Annals of Operations Research. He has authored and edited a number of books on asset management and, in 2002, was inducted into the Fixed Income Society’s Hall of Fame. From 1988 to 2023, he served on the board of directors of the BlackRock fixed income complex.

Kenneth R. French is Roth Family Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.

Ronald N. Kahn is a managing director and global head of systematic equity research at BlackRock, where he has overall responsibility for the research underpinning the Systematic Active Equity products. His service with the firm dates back to 1998, including his years with Barclays Global Investors, which merged with BlackRock in 2009. Prior to that, he worked as director of research at Barra. An expert on portfolio management, risk modeling, and quantitative investing, Dr. Kahn has published numerous articles on investment management, and he coauthored, with Richard Grinold, Active Portfolio Management: Quantitative Theory and Applications. The two of them won the 2013 James R. Vertin award, presented periodically by CFA Institute to recognize individuals who have produced a body of research notable for its relevance and enduring value to investment professionals. He has won the Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy award for best article in the Journal of Portfolio Management. Dr. Kahn is on the editorial advisory boards of the Financial Analysts Journal, the Journal of Portfolio Management, and the Journal of Investment Consulting. He teaches “International Equity and Currency Markets” in the Master of Financial Engineering Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kahn received an AB in Physics, summa cum laude, from Princeton University and a PhD in Physics from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow in physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Chairman, Centre for Endowment Asset Management, Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge

Elroy Dimson is chair of the Centre for Endowment Asset Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. His research focus is long-horizon investing and responsible investing, and his publications are on active ownership; investment management; endowment strategy; environmental, social, and governance investing; and financial market history. Professor Dimson’s books include Triumph of the Optimists, Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2020, Financial Market History, and Endowment Asset Management. His recent articles are on art investment, active ownership, real assets, financial history, endowment strategy, factor investing, fossil-fuel divestment, and asset management. Professor Dimson is chair of the advisory and policy boards of FTSE Russell and serves on the Supervisory Council of the Geneva Finance Research Institute, the Review Board of CFA Institute Research Foundation, and the Investment Committee of Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. Previously, he served as chair of the Strategy Council of the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global and as a professor and governor at London Business School. Professor Dimson is a fellow or honorary fellow of CFA UK, the Institute of Actuaries, the Royal Historical Society, the Risk Institute at Ohio State University, and Gonville & Caius College. He is emeritus professor of finance at London Business School, where he earned his PhD.

Roger Clarke is chairman of the board of Analytic Investors, Inc., an investment management firm, and serves as president of Ensign Peak Advisors, Inc. He is currently on the editorial board of the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Journal of Investment Management and previously served on the editorial board of the Financial Analysts Journal. Dr. Clarke has authored numerous articles and papers relating to quantitative investment management and is the recipient of three Graham and Dodd Scrolls from CFA Institute. He holds a BA degree in physics and an MBA degree from Brigham Young University, and an MS degree in economics and a PhD degree in finance from Stanford University.

2013 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences, Sterling Professor of Economics, Yale University.

Keith Ambachtsheer is director emeritus of the International Centre for Pension Management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, founding editor of the Rotman International Journal of Pension Management, and founding academic director of the Rotman-ICPM Board Effectiveness Program for Pension and Other Long-Horizon Investment Institutions. He founded and continues to serve as president of KPA Advisory Services Ltd, which provides strategic advice on governance, finance, and investment matters to governments, industry associations, pension plan sponsors, foundations, and other institutional investors around the world. Mr. Ambachtsheer also co-founded CEM Benchmarking Inc., which monitors the organizational performance of pension plans around the world. He has authored four books on pension management, has received pension industry awards for his work in Europe, the United States, Canada, and the Pacific Rim, and has been named one of the 10 Most Influential Academics in Institutional Investing by aiCIO. Mr. Ambachtsheer currently serves as a member of two corporate boards and four advisory councils.

Professor of Finance at Duke University and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Campbell R. Harvey is professor of finance at Duke University and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He served as editor of the Journal of Finance from 2006 to 2012. In 2016, he was elected president of the American Finance Association.

Clifford S. Asness is managing and founding principal at AQR Capital Management LLC. Previously, he was managing director and a director of quantitative research for the asset management division at Goldman Sachs. Dr. Asness serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Portfolio Management and the Financial Analysts Journal and the governing board of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Finance at New York University. He has received the James R. Vertin Award from the Research Foundation of CFA Institute for producing a body of research notable for its relevance and enduring value to investment professionals in addition to other awards given for his written articles. Dr. Asness holds a BS from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, a BS from the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, and an MBA and a PhD from the University of Chicago.

Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance and Director, Laboratory for Financial Engineering, Sloan School of Management, MIT

Andrew W. Lo is Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the director of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering. He focuses his research on the fundamental aspects of investments and financial markets, including the measurement of illiquidity risk in hedge fund returns, the growth of systemic risk in the hedge fund industry, and most recently, evolutionary and neurobiological models of individual risk preferences and financial markets. Before joining MIT’s finance faculty, Mr. Lo taught at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He has published numerous articles and books on finance and economics. Mr. Lo received his PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Edwin J. Elton is professor emeritus and scholar in residence at the New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York.

Martin J. Gruber is professor emeritus and scholar in residence at the New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York.

Professor in the Practice Emeritus of Finance, Yale School of Management; Chairman, Zebra Capital Management, LLC

Roger G. Ibbotson is Professor in the Practice Emeritus of Finance at Yale School of Management and chairman of Zebra Capital Management, LLC, a global equity investment and hedge fund manager. He is founder and former chairman of Ibbotson Associates. Professor Ibbotson conducts research on a broad range of financial topics, including popularity, liquidity, investment returns, mutual funds, international markets, portfolio management, and valuation. He has written numerous books and articles, including Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation (coauthored by Rex Sinquefield), which is updated annually and serves as a standard reference for information and capital market returns. Professor Ibbotson’s other books include The Equity Risk Premium, Lifetime Financial Advice, and, most recently, Popularity: A Bridge between Classical and Behavioral Finance. He is a regular contributor to and an editorial board member of both trade and academic journals. Professor Ibbotson serves on numerous boards and frequently speaks at universities, conferences, and other forums. He received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Purdue University, his MBA from Indiana University, and his PhD from the University of Chicago, where he also taught for more than 10 years and served as executive director of the Center for Research in Security Prices.

Martin L. Leibowitz is a managing director on Morgan Stanley's Global Research Strategy team, responsible for producing studies on such topics as beta-based asset allocation, long/short equity strategies and the need for greater fluidity in policy portfolios. Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Mr. Leibowitz was vice-chairman and chief investment officer of TIAA-CREF from 1995 to 2004, with responsibility for the management of more than $300 billion in equity, fixed income and real estate assets. Previously, he had a 26-year association with Salomon Brothers, where he became director of global research, covering both fixed income and equities. Mr. Leibowitz has written more than 150 articles on various financial and investment analysis topics and has been the most frequently published author in both the Financial Analysts Journal and the Journal of Portfolio Management. Ten of his articles have received the Graham and Dodd Award for excellence in financial writing. He also has written several books: his first, Inside the Yield Book, is considered an investment standard. The CFA Institute has presented him with three of its highest awards. Mr. Leibowitz received an AB and MS from the University of Chicago and a PhD in mathematics from the Courant Institute of New York University.

The James R. Vertin Award

Vertin Award Winners